Missed goal

My original ambitious plan was to post something about Don Quixote every day. Obviously, that did not happen during the month of January.nor has it happened so far during the month of February. I am going to try and be a little more consistent though with my posts, as the semester progresses.

Don Quixote class, Day 1

Today, for the first day of our Don Quixote class, we did a close reading of the first paragraph of Chapter 1, possibly the most famous opening paragraph in all of Spanish literature:

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor. Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda. El resto della concluían sayo de velarte, calzas de velludo para las fiestas, con sus pantuflos de lo mesmo, y los días de entresemana se honraba con su vellorí de lo más fino. Tenía en su casa una ama que pasaba de los cuarenta, y una sobrina que no llegaba a los veinte, y un mozo de campo y plaza, que así ensillaba el rocín como tomaba la podadera. Frisaba la edad de nuestro hidalgo con los cincuenta años; era de complexión recia, seco de carnes, enjuto de rostro, gran madrugador y amigo de la caza. Quieren decir que tenía el sobrenombre de Quijada, o Quesada, que en esto hay alguna diferencia en los autores que deste caso escriben; aunque por conjeturas verosímiles se deja entender que se llamaba Quijana. Pero esto importa poco a nuestro cuento: basta que en la narración dél no se salga un punto de la verdad.

I don't want to translate the whole thing right now, but basically my goals for this exercise had to do with strangeness and familiarity.

First of all, there's the strangeness of the language. This is modern Spanish, but it doesn't feel modern to today's students. It feels as unfamiliar as the English of the King James Bible. But by working through it together I hope to show them that its unfamiliarity is not an insurmountable barrier. it's important not to be put-off by the language, because much of Cervantes's humor is built on irony and witty turns of phrase and it's easy to get so bogged down in trying to make sense of the unfamiliar that we miss the comic elements.

I want them to appreciate the strangeness of the Spanish and of the world this book inhabits. Ironically, part of this strangeness is its utter ordinariness -- something we don't always recognize because 400 years separate our world from Don Quixote's. The world of the novel is not our world and the language is not our language. When I teach Don Quixote I try to acknowledge distance and I see it as my function -- especially with undergraduates -- to bridge the gap between those two worlds. As I said above, that gap can prevent us from recognizing just how ordinary the world of Don Quixote is. Cervantes was writing a parody of chivalric romances, which adventure books that were often set in exotic lands. For his parody, Cervantes chose La Mancha, possibly the least exotic place in all of Spain. This is perhaps unfair to California's great Central Valley, but I tell the students to imagine a superhero, whose mission in life is to protect not Metropolis or Gotham, but Bakersfield and Fresno.

More to come. 

A Glorious Mess

As I search for titles to include in my Don Quixote film series, I finally got around to watching the Orson Welles version. I suspect it's one of the great might-have-beens in film history. It was famously never finished, in fact, there seem to be questions about whether it was ever meant to be finished. Welles worked on it intermittently for decades; Spanish filmmakers Jesús Franco and Patxi Irigoyen cobbled together this version in 1992, seven years after Welles's death.

The result is sometimes jarring. In the English-language version that I watched sometimes the characters' voices are dubbed by different actors within the same scene. The film gets repetitive at times, some scenes go on far longer than they need to, and great stretches of the film feel more like scattered clips from Welles's home movies than a coherent whole.

However, despite its messiness there are glimpses of something wonderful. Welles sets the film in modern Spain, so not only do we get windmills, we also get to see Don Quixote, played by a gaunt Francisco Reiguera, attempt to liberate a protesting woman from the Vespa that has captured her. The first hour, in fact, is very funny. Quixote gets carried away by his flights of fancy, while Sancho, played by Akim Tamiroff, trails behind not quite knowing what to make of this madman. In the second hour it becomes clear that Sancho is the real star of this show; Don Quixote is a somewhat static myth while Sancho, in Welles's telling, is a "character."

What I really enjoyed about this film is that even in its fractured state it's the only Don Quixote adaptation I've seen that does real justice to the metafictional frame. Orson Welles pops up occasionally as a filmmaker named Orson Welles who is making an adaptation of Don Quixote. At one point Sancho gets a part as an extra in Welles's film. So Welles essentially becomes the voice of Cide Hamete Benengeli. The possibilities of this arrangement are delightful and were brought home to me in one of the never-ending scenes I complained of above. At one point Sancho is looking for Don Quixote on the midst of a town festival. As he stumbles among the spectators of a bullfight, more than one person dismisses him as crazy. We are watching a spectacle in which Sancho interacts with other people who dismiss him as mad, people who themselves are watching a spectacle that many other people would dismiss as mad. The question of madness and how to define it becomes impossible to ignore. And through it all the quixotic figure of Orson Welles smiles enigmatically as if to say "look what I've done."

The film, though, is nothing but a tease. A might have been. A mess. But a glorious one.

Quixotic Reference of the Day

I came across this one as I was browsing El Pais for material to use in my Spanish culture class. It’s a review by a writer named Maruja Tarre of Hillary Clinton’s book Hard Choices. Tarre describes herself as a fan of Clinton – one who feels profoundly let down by a book that reveals “una gran ignorancia del mundo en general y una extraordinaria arrogancia” [great ignorance of the world in general and extraordinary arrogance.] I have not read Clinton’s book, which many reviews said was unreadable, so I have to take Tarre’s word for it. What I found interesting was what for Tarre was the last straw:

... en dos oportunidades Hillary califica al gobierno de Muamar el Gadafi como “quijotesco”. Me parece que esa dictadura podía considerarse como grotesca, monstruosa, cruel, anacrónica, ¿pero quijotesca? ¿Qué visión tiene la flamante candidata y exsecretaria de Estado, de un personaje que es un arquetipo universal como Don Quijote? ¿Ha leído aunque sea un resumen para bachillerato, de la obra de Cervantes? Todos esos editores que corrigieron su libro, ¿no pensaron que comparar a un dictador como Gadafi con una figura emblemática de la hispanidad, podría resultar chocante para algunos de esos electores latinos que pretenden conquistar?

[... twice Hillary refers to the government of Muammar Gaddafi as “quixotic.” It seems to me that dictatorship could be thought of as grotesque, monstruous, cruel, anachronistic, but quixotic? What vision does the presumed presidential candidate and former Secretary of State have of such a universal archetype as Don Quixote? Did she bother to read even a summary of Cervantes’s work for her baccalaureate? Didn’t any of those editors who proofread her book think that comparing a dictator like Gaddafi with an emblematic figure of the Hispanic world might shock some of those Latino voters they want to win over?]

I am now curious to track down Hillary’s book and see how she uses “quixotic.” Meanwhile, in her possible defense, it’s worth pointing out that she’s not the only one to go that route with Gaddafi.

"Quixotic" in History

I found this interesting blurb from Talks on Temperance, by Frederic William Farrar (1881):

I know our attempt to resist the evil has been called Quixotic, and that we have been charged with a want of judgment. Be it so… I am not in the least degree afraid to be called Quixotic. I have enough experience of life, and have read enough of history to know that there has hardly ever been any single man who is been in the least degree more in earnest than his fellows, who has not been called Quixotic. In these days of a somewhat armchair kind of Christianity… to be called Quixotic, may be a testimony to which some honor may attach when it takes the form of an endeavor to do good to our fellow man. I am quite sure Luther would have been called Quixotic; Whitfield would have been called Quixotic, and also Howard and Wilberforce. To be called Quixotic very often means no more than this, that a man has been called into wakefulness of his peril, while others are slumbering around him through the mist. It means often that he is fired with a noble and necessary enthusiasm, having realized the dimensions of an evil to which others are blinded by familiarity. (pages 29-30)

I'm taken by the phrase "to be called Quixotic, may be a testimony to which some honor may attach when it takes the form of an endeavor to do good to our fellow man" because it seems that by this time the popular image of Don Quixote has become divorced from the actual novel. Because nearly every time Don Quixote endeavors to do good to his fellow man, he fails miserably.

Quixotic wordsmithery

I'm in Canada for the MLA with spotty wifi and no data roaming, so I missed posting yesterday. Here's a brief one for today. 

http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/01/06/word-inventor/21364263/

Zimmer said word developers have to be realistic, calling an attempt to fill in a gap in the language "quixotic" and warning that it likely will not catch on. And using word parts which likely don't resonate with current speakers also undermines its likelihood of success: "People wouldn't hear 'sofralia' and say, 'Oh.' "

Quixotic in the News

Today's use of 'quixotic' in the news comes courtesy Bloomberg's Dave Weigel on Twitter:

GOP rebels celebrate their quixotic campaign, with the nagging feeling they could have done better. http://t.co/R2y6fl5dvB
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) January 6, 2015

Don Quixote (2000)

Starring John Lithgow and Bob Hoskins. Aired on TNT in 2000.

When I was a grad student at UCLA I used to see John Lithgow walking his dogs on campus. He seemed somewhat approachable, and knowing he was starring in a new version of Don Quixote that was going to air on TNT, I decided to pitch an interview with him to the Los Angeles Times, for whom I had done some freelancing in the past. To my surprise, they bought the idea. Armed with an actual assignment I talked to Lithgow’s publicist, who set up a lunchtime interview for me during the upcoming press junket.

I went to Lithgow’s suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and we walked down together to the restaurant. Quick side note: On the way down the hall we passed another suite where someone was doing press interviews. Lithgow asked who it was, found out it was Tobey Maguire, and decided to pop in and say hello. I waited in the hall.

Anyway, we ended up at the restaurant, where I enjoyed some very good crab cakes and conducted a woefully inept interview. Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but even though I had been a newspaper reporter I did not have much experience in the celebrity interview department. But Lithgow was congenial and patient with me, the piece ran in the Calendar section of the Times, and I got a check along with lunch at the Four Seasons.

So what do I think of the film?

If you click on the link above you’ll notice that the story I published was not a review. I wasn’t there to critique the film. Lithgow asked what I thought of it and I told him I liked it. And I did, but I wasn’t blown away. I found the acting a little too mannered for my taste, the Duke and Duchess too benign, the pacing a bit languid and the tone occasionally too reverential. But no film of Don Quixote gets it exactly right; every reader has his own idea of how the book should play on the screen and no film is going to please everyone 100 percent.

But I do use clips from this film when I teach Don Quixote because there’s a lot that I like about it. For starters, the language. My students sometimes complain about how Bob Hoskins portrays Sancho; they find his cockney accent distracting or inappropriate. But I love it. I like how the simple difference in linguistic register signals an important fact about Don Quixote and his squire: they come from the same town, but one is a gentleman, and the other is an illiterate peasant laborer.

The Setting. Although never explicitly mentioned, from the costumes you can tell the film is set in the 19^th century. Some might have a problem with this; if you’re married to the idea that Don Quixote is the product of a particular time and place, then taking him out of the 17^th century might seem to be one liberty too many.

But really, why not set it in a different time? We've all seen Shakespeare adaptations in modern dress and there is precedent for doing the same with Quixote: Orson Welles gave Don Quixote a modern setting in his doomed production. But another reason for moving the setting to the 19^th century could be to simply make it that much more obvious to modern viewers that the armor-clad Don Quixote is very much a fish out of water.

Point of View. I like the way the film visualizes Quixote's madness. This is a clear contrast to what many other films do. Usually, when Don Quixote attacks the windmills, the audience sees windmills. See for example, this clip from the 1991 Televisión Española production staring Fernando Rey and Alfredo Landa:

http://youtu.be/IVJEo92sy48?t=2m48s

We only know what Don Quixote is seeing based on his own description. But the Lithgow film shows us what Don Quixote sees.

http://youtu.be/VuIUnw1_8X0?t=15m31s

This approach puts us in Don Quixote’s head. We understand his madness from experiencing it instead of just witnessing it.

DQ in the News: Pope Francis as Don Quixote

The Irish Independent today used two literary images to describe Pope Francis's attempts to reform the Vatican bureaucracy. On the one hand, he is compared to the heroic horsemen of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade."

An heroic poem proclaims that “Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred”.
And into the Vatican at Christmas boldly rode Pope Francis.

On the other hand, perhaps the Pope is more like everyone’s favorite misguided knight:

But some fear that Pope Francis is less like an heroic horseman in braided uniform than a well-intended Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. 

Inspired by noble ideas, but aided only by the simple Sancho Panza, Spain's Don Quixote set out to undo wrongs and to defend the helpless before things went wrong and he ended up attacking mills that he mistook for giants.

But people always forget that it wasn’t just noble ideas that inspired Don Quixote. In addition to the lofty ideas we must remember that he found those ideas in bad literature that drove him crazy.

A Moment in El Toboso (Dulcinea's village)

From my journal, Wednesday, August 23, 2000

At 11 a.m. the Centro Cervantino opened up. 

The museum displays some 273 editions of Don Quixote from all over the world and translated into some 43 languages. The oldest editions are from the 18th century. 

Many of the books are donated and signed by leaders from all over the world and from decades past. Among the world leaders donating signed copies of Don Quixote: Ronald Reagan, Moamar Qaddafi, Benito Mussolini and King Juan Carlos I. 

I asked the woman in charge about Alcázar de San Juan's claim to be Cervantes's birthplace. She said a local academic claimed that the church in Alcázar had Cervantes's baptismal record, but as far as she knew it has since disappeared. The plot thickens... 

After El Toboso we checked out the windmills at Campo de Criptana. What can I say? They are windmills. Actually, the hillsides all around this neck of the woods bristle with windmills, some still with their original mechanisms, some, apparently, just for the benefit of the tourists. We toured one windmill. At the top we could see how the sails turn these massive gears, which in turn move the millstones to grind the flour. The next floor below had a chute which would channel the flour into bags. The guy selling post cards said this mill was 400 years old. I don't think it's still in working condition. But it's still mightily impressive. 

Quixote news of note

Can't believe I didn't know about this. Apparently the ubiquitous and often-annoying James Franco has directed his own version of Don Quixote. I'm intrigued, yet mildly put-off.

Quixotic Endeavors

I’m intrigued by the word quixotic. I did a LexisNexis search this morning and looked for uses of quixotic during the previous 24 hours. Here is some of what I came up with:

From Associated Press:

Ron Paul, a physician and former congressman from Texas, opposed almost every facet of government as overreach during his time in office and two Quixotic campaigns for president, winning the nickname "Dr. No."

From a Washington Post travel article about Tijuana and its environs, wherein the writer is searching for Al Capone:

The room is decorated with blue-and-white ceramic tiles painted with scenes from Don Quixote, and there’s a lofted area above the bar where mariachis would play. There are sumptuous satin window treatments, crystal chandeliers, stately furnishings and a knock-off Renoir hanging on one wall, but the centerpiece is a stained-glass dome on the ceiling, under which Capone allegedly ran a card game. Today the space is used mostly for weddings. I’m beginning to feel like my hunt for Capone is itself a little quixotic. His name is on everyone’s lips, with whispers and rumors aplenty — but hard evidence is scarce.

In both cases, quixotic describes quirky, possibly lost causes – doomed endeavors undertaken by someone out of misplaced idealism, though possibly with honorable intentions. This is a far cry from how the word was used when it was first coined.

When I teach Don Quixote we return time and again to two fundamentally different modes of reading the book. The Romantic approach tends to idealize Don Quixote and his madness. The “funny book” school of Quixote criticism (primarily British) arose to counter the Romantics and focuses on how the novel was read and embraced in its early centuries. It was a work of entertainment, and Don Quixote himself was a figure of fun to be derided. 

This trajectory from funny to philosophical finds its parallel in the word quixote and its cognates and derivatives. Quixote, in Spanish, originally referred to a piece of armor meant to protect the thigh. With the popularity of Cervantes’s book, however, quixote acquired a secondary meaning, which the Diccionario de Autoridades from 1737 defines thusly:

QUIXOTE. Se llama al hombre ridiculamente sério, o empeñado en lo que no le toca. Latín. Ridiculus homo.

In other words, quixote is how one refers to a ridiculously serious man, or one who meddles in things that don’t concern him.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines quixotic as referring to persons, things or ideas “demonstrating or motivated by exaggerated notions of chivalry and romanticism; naively idealistic; unrealistic, impracticable; (also) unpredictable, capricious, whimsical.” 

The earliest use of quixotic cited in the OED comes from “Protestant Popery,” a satirical broadside in verse from 1718:

Pulpit and Press fictitious Ills engage,

And combat Windmills with Quixotic Rage:

Tumultuous Din and Clangor shakes the Sky, 

And each vile Scribbler waves his Banners high. 

Combating windmills does not come across here as delightfully endearing. The OED also cites an 1815 letter from JohnAdams in which he talks about Don Francisco de Miranda as “a vagrant, a vagabond, a Quixotic adventurer,” someone, in short, not worth thinking about (see page 157).

So in its early usage, quixotic did not carry positive connotations. But over the years, “unpredictable and capricious” have given way to “whimsical” as Don Quixote transitioned from being a distinctly Spanish madman into a universal symbol of doomed and misunderstood idealism. This is the reading preferred by the Romantic school.

Thus, the OED provides a quote from Harold Bloom’s 1994 book The Western Canon: “Against that claim I set the most poignant and Quixotic of all critical agonists, the Basque man of letters Miguel de Unamuno.” To Bloom, to be quixotic is to be poignant. Quixotic has moved from capricious and possibly dangerous to something admirable and almost endearing.

That change can also be seen in Spanish. The Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (sucessor to the Diccionario de Autoridades) defines quixote as:

m. Hombre que antepone sus ideales a su conveniencia y obra desinteresada y comprometidamente en defensa de causas que considera justas ...

[a man who places his ideals above his convenience and works in a committed and disinterested way in defense of causes he considers just ...]

So the lesson here is that language changes. And in this case, the trajectory of one particular word and its derivatives in two languages parallels the trajectory of the novel itself and how it is read.

How I prefer to read the novel remains to be seen.

The Windmills

These thoughts are somewhat choppy and random, especially toward the end, but I'll post them anyway.

Years ago at a family reunion I mentioned to my older sister that I was teaching Don Quixote for the first time. My sister asked, "what's that book about, anyway?" Her daughter, who was listening in on the conversation, piped up and said "Oh, you know Mom. It's about that guy who fights with windmills."

My niece, who must have been about 12, had absorbed the key image of Don Quixote. If you know nothing at all about Don Quixote, you at least know about the windmills. Google Don Quixote and the first thing that pops up is windmills. I have a theory about well-intentioned readers who dutifully begin reading Don Quixote. Like my niece, they know it has something to do with windmills. And like Mark Twain, they know it is a classic that has been much-praised and therefore ought to be read.

So like Don Quixote they sally forth on the adventure of reading and manage to get all the way to Chapter 8, where they encounter this: http://www.online-literature.com/cervantes/don_quixote/12/

At this point they came in sight of thirty forty windmills that there are on plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, "Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth."

"What giants?" said Sancho Panza.

"Those thou seest there," answered his master, "with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long."
"Look, your worship," said Sancho; "what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go."

"It is easy to see," replied Don Quixote, "that thou art not used to this business of adventures; those are giants; and if thou art afraid, away with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat."

So saying, he gave the spur to his steed Rocinante, heedless of the cries his squire Sancho sent after him, warning him that most certainly they were windmills and not giants he was going to attack. He, however, was so positive they were giants that he neither heard the cries of Sancho, nor perceived, near as he was, what they were, but made at them shouting, "Fly not, cowards and vile beings, for a single knight attacks you."

A slight breeze at this moment sprang up, and the great sails began to move, seeing which Don Quixote exclaimed, "Though ye flourish more arms than the giant Briareus, ye have to reckon with me."

So saying, and commending himself with all his heart to his lady Dulcinea, imploring her to support him in such a peril, with lance in rest and covered by his buckler, he charged at Rocinante's fullest gallop and fell upon the first mill that stood in front of him; but as he drove his lance-point into the sail the wind whirled it round with such force that it shivered the lance to pieces, sweeping with it horse and rider, who went rolling over on the plain, in a sorry condition. Sancho hastened to his assistance as fast as his ass could go, and when he came up found him unable to move, with such a shock had Rocinante fallen with him.

"God bless me!" said Sancho, "did I not tell your worship to mind what you were about, for they were only windmills? and no one could have made any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in his head."

"Hush, friend Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "the fortunes of war more than any other are liable to frequent fluctuations; and moreover I think, and it is the truth, that that same sage Friston who carried off my study and books, has turned these giants into mills in order to rob me of the glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity he bears me; but in the end his wicked arts will avail but little against my good sword."

And that is it. No more fighting against windmills will occur for the rest of the novel, nor are they even mentioned again, except in a sort "I told you so" way. My personal theory is that by the time most well-intentioned readers get to this point the've found the novel to be not an easy read. They get to the windmills and find it somewhat anticlimactic. Their enthusiasm begins to flag and not only do they not finish the novel, they most likely do not make it through Chapter 9, which is a shame, because that's where things start to get funky.

So if the book is not really about a guy who fights windmills, why is that particular image the one most associated with Don Quixote? I don't know. But it is emblematic of many of the tensions inherent in the book. For those inclined to see the novel as a witness to social change, then Don Quixote is the perfect emblem of a man who finds himself becoming progressively alienated. He yearns to recreate an idealized past in the face of an impersonal present.

Sancho and Don Quixote
The windmill episode may be anticlimaticic, but should not be taken as unimportant. There is evidence within the book itself that many readers at the time of Cervantes considered it their favorite episode. Indeed, it is with the windmill episode that certain tensions get crystalized that will mark the rest of volume one. Among these are the tension between past and present, beween fantasy and reality, between fact and fiction. These tensions get personified in the persons of Don Quixote and Sancho, and in fact we could add a few more: book wisdom/popular wisdom; carnavalesque inversion of and subversion of social mores; sanity/madness.

In the windmill episode Don Quixote has his first adventure accompanied by Sancho Panza. Sancho is more connected to the realities of life (especially economic). He lives in the world, not in the clouds. He is also street smart. But he is not astute enough to see through DQ's promises to him.

The very fact that these two have been thrown together provides ample ground for them to bicker. Sancho's job at the beginning seems to be one of undermining DQ at every turn. When DQ gives a high sounding speech about how knights errant are accustomed to sleep in the open and go a month without food, Sancho all but rub his face in the fact that DQ can pass vigil all he wants, but SP is going to eat.

The Library

A quick word about Don Quixote's library.

After the knight returns home, as he sleeps, recovering from his first sally, his friends and family gather to consider how best to help him. They pin the blame for his madness on the books he has been reading. What follows is a parody of an auto de fe, with two of Don Quixote's friends, the Priest and the Barber, functioning as Inquisitors.

From a literary point of view, the scene in Don Quixote's library is important for another reason: characters within the novel become literary critics, judging which books are worthwhile and which must be consigned to the flames based on the effect those books have on the reader and how truthful they are.

A theme that the author presented in the prologue gets picked up by the characters: the pernicious influence of books that imitate lies rather than the truth. Art, in this schema, is imitation. Art is a representation of something; good art represents real things. True things. Fiction, by definition, is a lie. But fiction can have value if it imitates reality; if it imitates the truth. The problem with books of chivalry, from this point of view, is that they represent things that clearly have no basis in reality. They are works of fantasy, and therefore have no worth. Not only do they have no worth; they are dangerous. Because if the role of art is to imitate things, the role of the reader is to imitate art. In other words, art is expected to have an effect on the world because it is assumed that the audience will imitate models found in art. Hence, it is in the interest of the reader (and of society) to seek out good models to imitate. Bad art has a pernicious effect on the world, and the clearest evidence of this is Don Quixote himself: he is presented, from the beginning, as a reader incapable of discerning truth from fiction, one who has chosen the wrong model to imitate.

Viewed in this way, Don Quixote becomes a parable of reading, with a clear tension between critical readers and uncritical readers. This is an idea I return to many times throughout the semester.

The scrutiny of the books in Don Quixote's library, then, is a detailed examination of several titles, not only of chivalric romance, but also of pastoral poetry (another popular genre of the time that we'll return to later). Some books are saved: Amadis de Gaula (seen as the original chivalric romance, therefore worth keeping); Cervantes's own Galatea (shameless self promotion from the author). Most are tossed into the patio to be burned. One book is singled out for praise: Tirante el blanco (Tirant lo blanc, a fifteenth century book, written originally in Catalan). This is the best book in the world, the Priest declares: "in it knights eat, and sleep, and die in their beds, and make a will before they die, and do everything else that all the other books of this sort leave out" (from the Edith Grossman translation). In other words, it has value because it eschews fantasy and reflects life (it is also very erotic in parts, which made for some lively class discussions when I read it as a graduate student).

So in Chapter 6 we have literary characters critiquing fiction. They are not quite critiquing the work in which they themselves appear, but they are getting perilously close to metafiction, a mode of fiction that might best be described as "self conscious." Ironically, by attempting to cure Don Quixote by burning his books, these characters inadvertently lay the groundwork for what is to follow. When Don Quixote wakes up and attempts to go into his library he finds instead a blank wall. His friends have walled it up; his niece explains that an enchanter, Frestón, has spirited his library away. From this point on, Don Quixote begins to treat Frestón as his nemesis.Ironically, in attempting to cure the knight's madness, his friends have only made it worse, for now Don Quixote has a convenient excuse every time his fantasy bumps up against inconvenient reality: Frestón did it.

The First Sally

Since Don Quixote is first and foremost a parody of chivalric romance, it helps to know something of this much-maligned genre. To find out more, I have my students read a helpful article by Daniel Eisenberg, a primer of sorts about the "typical" chivalric romance. The chivalric romance is set in the distant past, often in an exotic locale. The hero is young and handsome, and usually of royal blood, although at the beginning he may be a foundling who does not know his true identity (as is the case with Amadis of Gaul, the most famous chivalric hero). There is more, but this is enough to show the broad outlines of Cervantes's parody: in place of a young, handsome, royal hero we have an old, weathered hidalgo, who by definition occupies the lowest rung on the noble ladder. Instead of an exotic locale, we get La Mancha, which, for Cervantes's readers would have been the least exotic place imaginable. From our point of view it might be difficult to grasp how ordinary, mundane, non-exotic Don Quixote's world is. Imagine Fresno, I tell my students. Or Bakersfield.

Unfair? Perhaps. But anyone who's traveled an interstate highway and stopped at a truck stop can imagine the normal, ordinary people that Don Quixote encounters during his first sally. And that goes a long way toward helping us appreciate the humor of the situation. There is a tension between the ordinary world through which DQ moves and the exotic setting of the romance that's playing out inside his head. He arrives at the 16th-century Spanish equivalent of a truck stop, complete with truckers (muleteers), and dubious women, and acts as if he is entering a castle. He addresses a pair of prostitutes as if they were noble ladies, and the innkeeper as if he were a castellan.

The parody here is as broad as possible, consisting of contrasts between the chivalric fantasy and the real world. Our hero is knighted, and then he leaves the inn in search of adventures.

His first two adventures are important because they set the tone for all that is to follow. First he meets Andres, a young shepherd who is being beaten by his employer. Don Quijote stops the beating and demands that the employer pay Andres what he is owed. Then DQ leaves, trusting that the man will keep his word, ignoring Andres's pleas. Once DQ has left, the employer begins to beat the boy again, giving him a worse beating that he would have otherwise received.

In my last post I talked about good intentions and bad decisions, and here is the prime example in the knight's first adventure. Attempting to do good, DQ ends up doing harm. Not only that, but the outcome is worse than if he had never intervened in the first place.

After Andres, DQ encounters a group of merchants, taking them for knights, he demands that they confess that Dulcinea is the most beautiful woman in the world. They jokingly decline, infuriating the knight, who then attacks them. He ends up being beaten to a pulp. This also establishes a pattern of comic violence that will continue throughout the novel.

Don Quijote is found by a neighbor, who helps him home, waiting until nightfall before entering the village, to keep the knight from being a public spectacle. This will be important as we reach the end of part one.

In this first sally, Don Quijote travels alone. The innkeeper who knights him gives him some salient advice: he really should bring clean shirts with him when he travels; he should also remember to bring money. This confuses the knight, who comments that none of the books he has read have ever mentioned money. That's because, the innkeeper says, something so obvious should not need to be mentioned.

Many (including my old professor, the late Carroll Johnson) have pointed out that Don Quixote reflects a transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy; the knight's nostalgia for the past and resistance to the modern world he lives in thus get a materialist explanation. I'm by no means a marxist, and am reluctant to place too much emphasis on such interpretations. But the tension between imperfect present and idealized mythic past is significant. And economics matters, and will matter even more when Sancho Panza enters the picture.

Good Intentions and Bad Decisions

My life is punctuated by a series of good intentions and bad decisions. I am teaching Don Quixote this semester, and I intended to spend the semester posting regularly about the class, the book, the experience of reading, and other musings. Instead, I've let a third of the semester go by without positing anything. Neglecting to post is the result of pure laziness and inertia, the twin demons that have plagued me my entire life; they can't be blamed on a bad decision. The bad decision came before the semester began, when I announced my project to a few fellow Quixote aficionados and invited them to post as well. And, of course, since then I've done nothing.

So, five weeks into the semester, maybe the time has come to post something.

Actually, I think "Good Intentions and Bad Decisions" would make a good title for this post, since Don Quixote is, in large part, an exploration of a series of bad decisions that result from good intentions gone amok. This might appear to be a counter-intuitive take on Don Quixote; we are accustomed to think of the novel as a Great Book, protagonized ('protagonist' is a noun that gets verbified quite frequently in Spanish literature classrooms) by a Great Hero. And maybe he is; the question of whether or not DQ might rightly be called a hero is one that still engages scholars. I wrote a paper once and submitted it to the Cervantes Bulletin, only to be righteously scolded by an anonymous reader for being insufficiently reverential toward the great one. Never mind that the great man is, in fact, a fictional character and the question of how he should be read has been ...

Never mind. Where was I? Oh yes: Good Intentions and Bad Decisions.

When the novel opens we are introduced to a not-well-off (if not outright poor) country gentleman (hidalgo, in Spanish) who is so addicted to books of chivalry that he begins to sell off his land in order to buy more of them. So much reading of so many books of so doubtful worth drives him crazy and he decides to reinvent himself as a knight errant. He cleans up an old suit of armor that had belonged to his great grandfather, thinks up a new name for himself, and sets forth to have adventures.

Part of my task as a teacher is to help students bridge the gap between our world and the world of Don Quixote. The book was published more than 400 years ago. Tastes have changed. Humor that was topical at the time is lost on us now. Odd juxtapositions, irony and anachronisms that would have been obvious to a 17th century reader need to be explained today. Simply put, I think it's lost on 21st century readers how out of place a knight in armor would be in the 17th century. Many students today assume that DQ is a medieval book and that his time was the Middle Ages.

So I started the class with two examples. One is very contemporary. I showed the students an article about a would be superhero in Seattle, who dresses in a costume and attempts to fight crime. The question is this: is this man crazy? Or, put another way, is this sort of behavior rational? Much like Don Quixote, this is a man who has evidently read a lot of a particular sort of book, or perhaps watched many of a particular sort of movie, has found in them something that he feels is worth imitating, something that is lacking in the world in which we live, and has decided that enacting what he finds in those books might have a positive affect on the world. Is this a good decision, or a bad decision? Is it rational or irrational? Will these undeniably good intentions end up helping the world or harming it?

In another story I tell my students, I recall my first real job out of college, when I worked for a small, thrice-weekly newspaper in California's Eastern Sierra. I lived in a little cabin outside of town on the edge of the desert, and one of my neighbors was a chiropractor who seemed to believe he was living in the Old West. He had two beautiful Arabian horses, and had the habit of feeding them inside his cabin (no lie: more than once I saw the hind end of a horse out on his porch, with the mouth end somewhere inside getting sustenance). He would dress in cowboy gear, complete with Stetson, bandana, chaps and six shooters. I remember driving down the highway and passing him as he galloped on the shoulder, revolver in hand, living the life. I never talked to him about his habit, which appeared strange to me. But in retrospect I have to ask: was he imitating the Old West the way it really was, or the Old West from classic Hollywood, the Old West that only exists as a collective myth?

I try to help the students make the connection that a Don Quixote dressed in armor, setting forth to right the world of wrongs, was as out of place in his time as a six-shooter-wielding cowboy galloping down the shoulder of four-lane blacktop highway is in our time. And that a man who imitates the heroes he reads about in books about knights errant is much like a man who imitates the heroes he reads about in comic books. And that in either case, the time and place and person that our reader seeks to emulate is one that only ever existed on a mythic plane, in fiction. The Old West my chiropractor neighbor believed in only ever existed in books and movies. Superheroes only exist in comic books and movies. And knights errant only ever existed in poetry and romance.

Nevertheless, and this is important, the world of knight errantry is real to Don Quixote. It represents an older, better time, one that he hopes to recapture. The question though, is this: by attempting to remake the world along the lines of fantasy fiction, is Don Quixote, in the words of John Jay Allen, a hero or a fool?